It’s hard to distribute equipment, food and shelter at zero marginal cost. It’s easy to distribute software at zero marginal cost. So let’s start there.
No one is stopping you. Build it, then distribute it. You will find that as long as people need to pay for their living, there is no post-scarcity world in any domain, especially not the digital one.
Academic institutions already pay salaries whether they fund open source development or Wolfram Research, so not sure what you’re trying to argue. People haven’t been starving while doing research in the open.
But academic institutions didn’t produce Mathematica. The point is simple: a lot of useful software like Mathematica has not been open-source for a reason. It is not about distribution being free; it is about production being expensive.
Some form of Mathematica has been open for a long time, in the form of Sage etc. There's no reason why academic institutions can't pool more money to develop these further.
Sage is a nice effort, but it isn't Mathematica. I use Mathematica, I don't use Sage. Academic institutions had almost 40 years to "pool more money", yet there is nothing that rivals Mathematica. The reason is simple: open-source doesn't pay well enough.
